A Watery Paradise - Rowland Vaughan and Hereford's 'Golden Vale'

Hereford’s Golden Vale had long been the home of two important families. Vaughans fought beside the earls of Pembroke at Creçy and Poitiers; Sir John Vaughan died defending the king at Agincourt. Though there were similarly valorous Parrys, their best-known representative was Blanche, who served Elizabeth Tudor from nursery to throne, and is generally thought to have taught that monarch something of the Welsh language. She sponsored numerous young kinsmen at Court; one great-nephew, Rowland Vaughan, was a credit to her, becoming Groom of the Chamber, and a member of Parliament. Another great-nephew, also Rowland Vaughan, was an embarrassment. Despite three years' nagging by Blanche Parry, the former proved to be no courtier, and was sent off to the Irish wars, where he acquitted himself bravely until invalided home.

Home was Herefordshire; the Wye valley, and the parallel Golden Valley. Vaughans and Parrys were everywhere on both sides of the Black Mountains – Merioneth, Bredwardine Castle, Bacton, Moccas, Snodhill, Newcourt. It was a monotonous life, apart from the hunting; Rowland was about to escape to the Lowland wars when another cousin appeared; Elizabeth Vaughan had just reached marriageable age, and Rowland's thoughts instantly turned from military to matrimonial. His bride, although beautiful, wealthy and affectionate when it suited her, was as imperious as Blanche:

least shee should have held me carlesse of her good, and so ill deserve her love, I obeyed her will as many doe...

One March day, Rowland crept like a snail unwillingly to Elizabeth's miller, under orders to confront him. Millers were local autocrats; gentry were nominally superior, but no one willingly crossed a miller, not even the milt owner. This mill owner sent her husband. The cause of Elizabeth's complaint is not recorded, but the winter had been dry and cold. Her overshot mill stood beside the river, from which water was diverted into the mill pond. To keep the mill working at full capacity, the miller had probably taken so much water that other parts of the estate were deprived. He may well have been aggressive; all the tenants were expected to bring their corn to him, and he also had to grind for the landowner. He could not be expected to leave water elsewhere with so much work to be done. There would have been a mighty confrontation, but it seems that Rowland never arrived.

He saw that the ground was cracked and barren. Yet there was a strip, about a pace wide and twenty paces long 'which did wonderfully content mee, seeing it pleasing greene'. The bank of a nearby brook had an out-size mole-hill through which the mole had driven a horizontal tunnel. Water flowed through it, down the sloping and otherwise parched meadow, its path conspicuously verdant. The thought occurred: if accidental diversion were so beneficial, what wonders might be wrought by deliberate large-scale irrigation?

The revelation changed Rowland's outlook, and it shows in the account he published in 1610; The Most Approved and Long Experienced Water- Workes. Pre-revelation, he felt he owned nothing; 'my father's house', 'her miller' – nothing was his. Post- revelation he wrote 'my mill', 'my tenant', 'my ground' – he was master. His estate assumed an unwonted appearance.

He devised a system of ridges, trenches and sluices whereby river water, when needed, could be moved across the land as a shallow, protective film. No swamping, no stagnation; the gradient of the whole area must be adjusted to give precise control. All landowners dreaded the end of a hard winter, when hay was exhausted long before the regrowth of pasture. Then, they had to sacrifice early wheat and cover which had been destined for autumn hay, otherwise farm animals wou1d starve. Hay for later use must be purchased and expensively transported; at least, until now. Rowland was jubilant; he had solved a dire problem.

For his neighbours, life was never the same again. Some caught his enthusiasm; others were strangely un- impressed. To him, it seemed logical; rivers and streams pursued their way without respect for official boundaries, therefore the landowners must work together as if those boundaries did not exist; that is to say, they must obey Rowland's behests. His account shows how he fared. 'A gentleman of worth' was an amenable neighbour. Those who 'summoned a consultation against mee' were mere inhabitants. One tenant was described as aged and simple, though the accuracy of that last adjective is dubious. He ignored Rowland's first friendly approach. The next, a straight landlord-to-tenant proposal, fared no better. Finally, Rowland tried an order remembered from his military days: 'not to stand at staffes-end with his commander.' It was useless. 'These buggs-words would not moove him.'

Neither was Rowland very much moved. He had money and labour, and suitable land for experiment; a thirty-acre meadow 'over-worne with age', untended by previous generations, lying between the millstream and the main river, with at least one co-operative neighbour:

Having vewed the convenientest place the uppermost part of my grounde would afforde for placing a Commanding-Weare or Sluce, I espied divers water-fills on my neighbours grounds, higher than mine by seaven or eight foote; which gave mee greater advantage for drowning of more ground that I was of my owne power able to doe.

Conditions were ideal. The Dore flowed through the Golden Valley, fed by streams from the Welsh mountains and passing through Newcourt on its way; his birthplace was now his main residence and the scene of his great project; the Water- Workes, or Drownings. Where possible he harnessed and diverted; otherwise he dug afresh.

The main control was a great trench across the higher end of the meadow, at right angles to the river. This Trench Royal was ten feet wide and four deep; excavated soil was thrown back along the upper side to form a bank seven feet high; water came into the trench through a stout wooden sluice gate in the river bank. Below the Trench Royal, the ground was formed into a series of parallel ridges from one to five feet wide, notched at regular intervals to allow water to trickle down, though it must pause long enough to feed the ground; when necessary, it could be held by a supply of turves piled ready to thrust into the notches. At the lower end of the meadow, the water rejoined the river through another sluice.

The topping, or braving trench, was a vital adjunct. Parallel to the river, at a distance of about five feet, it was connected to the river by a sluice, providing an emergency drain in case of flooding, and a quick topping-up for the main trench in dry spells, without waiting for a sluggish river. It also protected the meadow from moles resident in the river bank. One of them had been the initial begetter of the great idea, but the whole race must be rigorously excluded from the drownings, (or their hills and tunnels would divert the water from its proper route as planned by Rowland.

Success meant that the Newcourt estate, originally worth £40 a year, rose in value to over £300. Soon after the earliest drownings of the year, livestock grazed on fresh pasture; when they transferred to normal pastures, renewed drownings brought an extra hay crop – sometimes two. Feed problems were solved, and there were valuable side effects. Trenches and drains needed regular scouring; this yielded rich silt, providing top dressing for the fields. There was a canal; as the whole project expanded, the Trench Royal had to be extended to a length of three miles, and it could take boats:

I made two litle ones for the carriage of earth, which I found to do mee such service as I know two Teames in a day could not countervaille any of them.

Autonomous in his 'Paradice', Blanche Parry's black sheep was reformed by his project. Well before her death in 1590, it was fully operational, at least three hundred acres of it; she knew and approved, for she left him £100. Bearing in mind the number of Vaughans and Parrys with expectations, that was approval indeed. Other members of the family were also impressed; those who owned Hergest Court, in the northern valley of the Arrow, left their own traces of ditches and sluice gates. Few contemporary documents remain apart from his own book; there are some deeds, showing that in 1609 Rowland and Henry Vaughan of Moccas exchanged five acres in Dorstone for George Parry's five and a half acres in Snodle (Snodhill) and Dorstone. The latter was near 'the ditch or gutter of water.'

Almost certainly, Rowland had worked it out alone. In his book he mentions two visitors who had seen similar but smaller projects in Devon. He never claimed to he unique, but he was no traveller; rare journeys to London were mostly lawsuit-induced – 'enough to breede white hayres in a Brittains beard' – and there were no recorded visits to other landowners. 'I forgatt Ambitious Resolutions... the love of my Water-Workes stole my desire from thence.'

Rowland was apparently isolated, but contemporary agricultural literature shows that similar work existed elsewhere. Five years before his 'Water-Workes' appeared, Sir Richard Weston published a book; A Discours of Husbandrie used in Brabant and Flanders:

There I saw a goodlie Marsh or feeding ground for cattle which was kept with a strong bank for being overflowed by the river of Sceld [Scheldt], under which notwithstanding there lair sluices to let in the water when they pleased, and ditches were made in the marsh to convey it back to the river at low tides when they thought fit.

Sir Richard used the system on his own Surrey estate, Sutton Place, '...having improved my land as much as any man in the Kingdom hath done, both by water and fire'. The latter reference is probably to the process known as Devonshiring. Encroaching woodland scrub was cut out and burnt, the ashes being dug back into the soil.

In 1649, Walter Blith (Blyth) published his survey of husbandry, The English lmprover. In it he gave a detailed account of various agricultural improvements of which he had considerable experience. One of these was the creation and maintenance of water meadows, with a number of tools specially designed for use at each stage. With the trenching plough, or coulter, both sides of a trench might be cut simultaneously. Again, neat turves were an essential part of the system:

For the taking up of Turfe thou must make a spade on purpose, with a bit [cutting edge] looking up twice as much as our ordinary spades doe... [the] bit must be exceeding well steeled and more broader at the nether end... which will take up the Turfe all at one thicknesse... This Spade is admirable usefull to cleanse the bottom of the Trenches for which use it were very necessary to have another an inch and a half narrower than the former, for lesser and narrower Trenches...

Blith, more of a traveller than Rowland, had seen sundry experiments in water meadows. He also searched, in London, for books on that and other agricultural subjects. He found one by Gabriel Platts – 'very Rationall and Ingenuous' – in which the improvements quoted are from 300s to £300; he seems not to have found a copy of Rowland's book. He refers rather sharply to some Dutchmen who 'not many years since' travelled the country under pretence of floating land, but does not specify the places in which they exercised their dubious skills.

Rowland's book is dedicated to his very distant cousin, the Earl of Pembroke, whose Wilton estates were in the heart of Wiltshire water meadow country as we know it and where the system flourished until well after the First World War. The beginnings of the system there, as everywhere except Hereford, are obscure. Whether, before the day of the mole, Rowland first heard a hint of such wonders from his august relative or one of his employees; or whether the earl actually read the book and took the idea from that, is uncertain.

In general, it seems probable that the development of the system hinged upon the circumstances and conditions generally prevalent in the mid sixteenth century. Life for most people was difficult, sickness all- prevalent, – sweating sickness, hot burning fever, bubonic plague symptoms varied but the consequence was predictable: hardship. High food prices, moving higher; plague deaths left fewer, more expensive labourers, therefore prices rose yet again. Ingenuity was taxed to the utmost but landowners were fortunate in one important respect. Peace gave them a chance to concentrate. In many places, where land had once been either arable or pasture, farmers began to find it advantageous to combine those uses; from arable to pasture, and pasture to arable, turn and turn about on the same land. Improvements to simple irrigation would follow naturally, particularly where, as in the Golden Valley, natural watercourses offered more than a hint of the possibilities. Many tried, but only Rowland Vaughan recorded the full story.

In solving one problem, he found others. Too many gleaners in a harvest field; too many unemployed labourers - almost three hundred in the Golden Valley, though the Drownings made work for many. He noticed that cottage workers such as weavers lost much earning time. They must prepare food, and till their tiny plot of land; a whole day was lost in carrying finished work to Hereford market. Corn must be carried to the miller, who sent humbler customers to the back of the queue. And so forth; it was a time and motion study in 'Paradice', and Rowland felt some sympathy with folk who turned to begging. It was less strenuous. In early summer there were plenty of curds and whey to be had almost for the asking. With late summer and early autumn came the privilege of gleaning, though it was often abused, particularly by those who pillaged gardens and orchards.

Like modern commentators, Rowland tended to use figures as adjectives rather than facts. Given space on television, he would have said ‘99 per cent of my tenants live on the poverty line.’ In this book, he gives the number of poor as two or three hundred; on the next page as his passion increases so do his figures: 'There bee within a mile and a halfe from my house. . . five hundred poore habitations.’ Numerical accuracy apart, he was deeply concerned and ready to act. He planned a commonwealth. Many trades would be brought together into a self-sufficient community; his list is a proud procession of skills.

Butcher, Bakers, Shoo-maker, Currier, Sickle-maker, Smith, Mercer, Barber, Stocking-knitters, Lanthorne-maker, Fletcher, Bowyer (hold breath) Card-maker for spinners, Swineheards, two vittelers, and a noyse of Musitions...

There were many others, including the 'Clarke' who seems to have had some difficulty with dictation. All trades would work in the community, materials being home-produced or bulk-purchased. All necessaries, food and clothing included, would be available at reasonable rates. Workers would wear garments made within the community from the same Welsh cloth - red frieze - which Rowland himself seems to have worn.

No one would waste good working time in fetching and carrying, for that was the task of the 'Currier'. Cooking would be done by Rowland's cooks in his kitchens, offering a wide choice: 'Rawe, Roasted, Boyled' or cold. Tools and equipment would be available as needed - twenty broad-looms for wool cloth, ten narrow looms for coarser fabrics, ten for fustian, and even silk looms as necessary.

Rowland calculated that eventually there would be 'some two thousand and upwards machanicalls'; even bearing in mind his airy way with figures, that seems oversize. Neither was he counting wives and children; how his mechanically were to be replaced when depleted by natural wastage, he failed to consider. No wives, children or apprentices; just craftsmen, at full stretch:

They shall never lose an hour's time to provide for such meanes as back or belly require; bread, beef, butter... of my own provision shall attend their appointed hours.

Note the conditional nature of that statement. Rowland described his project so vividly that he has occasionally been misunderstood. Some readers have assumed that the commonwealth really came into being, and they searched the Golden Valley for its remains, wondering whether the great building complex might have been destroyed during the Civil War.

It was never built. Rowland's purpose in writing his book was to attract sponsorship; an uneasy quest, then as now. His figures may well have been his undoing. Even if the book had been read by Pembroke, to whom it was chiefly addressed, it could not have inspired much confidence in a man of business; not to the extent of the financial backing for which Rowland was asking. Not only were his numerical estimates haphazard; he was promising to employ a preacher to conduct morning and evening prayers in the community chapel, at the same time complaining that it was almost impossible to find incumbents for the two tiny churches of which he was patron; Turnastone, and Vowchurch:

All our company will turne their songs and carrols into singing of Psalms and Himmes... but before we shall be able to sing in tune, you [Pembroke] must be Maister of the Musick, and Organist withall.

To clinch the matter, he underlined with pride the account of his existing achievement:

In my first foundation the Countrey said I should never be able to perform the same, that I could not command the water... I have acquainted the water with his course.

The great water meadows were his guarantee and testimonial.

For some reason he had not approached Pembroke in the first instance, but tried to borrow on a purely business basis. The Jews turned him down out of hand. Then he approached a usurer near St Paul's. He arrived – not on the appointed day – to find that the gentleman employed 'bouncers'.

I shall never forget the fashion of their faces, two Orange-tawny beards in a bloody field (Gules, my Lord); they walked as if they would have over-walked me; but having gotten my broadside they said stand... they brought me to a Garrison near the Exchange guarded with a number of Varletiers. God knew my heart when I saw all Halberds... I speake not as if it tended to provoke any of your Lordships to pitty me... yet if any turn with zeale to lend me money to so good a purpose, the heavens forfend that I should quench it.

There was nothing to quench. No one offered to help; no one, as he put it, whose purse could stand the push of a pike. But what of his own purse, in the face of his proposal to keep a special dining room always ready to accommodate forty sponsors at any one time? More – they would be attended by those same 'mechanicalls' whose main purpose in being there was to avoid losing time in their own trade. Cousin Pembroke was not interested.

As with water meadows, one feels that this idea of a commonwealth was Rowland's own, home-grown in the Golden Valley. Would he have had any knowledge of More's Utopia, written about eighty years previously? He seems not to have been studious, and was indeed out of his depth at a Court of which the queen so highly valued learning: Utopia was a Latin text. Certainly his book has a Latin tag on the title page, but that was as conventional as the collection of encouraging verses inside. It will also be realised that while he was no longer much aware of the world outside the Golden Valley, that world was hardly aware of him. In all the outpouring of his book, only the two visitors from Devon are mentioned: his companions from army days were banished long since by Elizabeth. London was the home of lawyers and usurers – scoundrels, to be visited rarely and briefly. He may have retained stray fragments of talk heard long ago, of the beheaded statesman and author, but Rowland's desire for commonwealth was induced by his concern for all too common poverty. Both men were activated by that, and their work shows the same respect for discipline. There, the difference becomes more pronounced. More's Utopian working hours were strictly limited to six per day, whereas Rowland, having relieved everyone of routine duties, would hardly be content with less than sixteen. No wives or children would be permitted in the Golden Valley, whereas More has marriage, albeit a somewhat calculating variety. More was playing with ideas; Rowland was trawling them, gathering in every notion which offered hope of abolishing that unemployment which he found so unendurable.

His plan is full of inconsistencies but it has an urgency, an immediacy which stamps it as a sincerely humanitarian work, beside which More's Utopia pales somewhat. Given the finance for which he pleaded, Rowland in his compassion would have hammered out a solution; much trial and many errors, many bruised feelings, but something as functional as the 'water-workes'.

Yet the idea of commonwealth was alive, reaching forward into a troubled century. Blith in 1649 was recommending common ownership of land; the beginnings of communism:

Where all mens' lands lie intermixed... the ingenious are disabled to the improving theirs because others will not, neither sometimes can the improvement be made upon any unless upon all jointly...

He also suggested nationalisation of the mines:

A fifth prejudice is the want of a thorough searching of the bowels of the earth, a business more fit to be undertaken by the honourable representation of this whole Kingdome then by any particular man. Whence are all our mines of Lead, Tinne, Iron, Coales, and Silver Mines in Wales, were they not once hid...?

In that same year, came a valiant little experiment in genuine communism, sadly doomed from the start. True, they sent the government of Cromwell fair warning:

We know that England cannot be a free Commonwealth unless all the poor Commons have a free use and benefit of the land. For if this freedom be not granted, we that arc the poor commoners are in a worse case than we were in the King's days.

The Diggers and their leader, Gerrard Winstanley, though treated leniently by the Council of State and General Fairfax, were subject to all the animosity of local landlords who had them arrested for trespass, even though they were digging common land.

In water meadow districts, collective working flourished for many years. The creation of that system was a costly undertaking; an expert drowner, experienced and adaptable, was essential. He was also expensive. Like Rowland, farmers realised the wisdom of combining land resources if they were to obtain maximum benefit from available water and expertise; similarly, with the necessary sheep. Large numbers were necessary; it was economical to combine all local flocks to be tended as a unit by the best available shepherds on the combined pasture.

It might be argued that Rowland's plan was too paternalistic to be a commonwealth; there would have been no question of ownership, no doubt as to where the authority lay. No one would have been permitted to stand at staffes-end with the commander, and buggs-words would be his alone. Yet his concern for the relief of unemployment was genuine, and his efforts led him into personal hardship. To write a book may have been a more fearsome prospect than to face the moneylender's halberdiers, but he was undeterred. A thousand pities that he was never enabled to put his theories into practice; he would have been a dictator, but benevolent.